


Of Boredom and Creme Brulee

by Ladybmorebelle



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Boredom, Child Genius, Childhood, Cooking, Crush, M/M, Origin Story, Talents, atomwave, i just wanted to make Mick eat a creme brulee, unrequited - or is it??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 00:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12737697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybmorebelle/pseuds/Ladybmorebelle
Summary: Ray learned a long time ago that boredom was a waste of his time. He just didn't know that one of his many talents would lead him to Mick Rory.





	Of Boredom and Creme Brulee

Ray Palmer, genius, philanthropist, inventor, and all-around good guy, was a man of many secret talents.

They were kind of useless, other than the obvious ones - everybody knew he was brilliant, of course, but very few people knew he could do things like tie cherry stems with his tongue and sing the alphabet backwards to the tune of the 1812 overture. 

When you’re smart - really, really smart - boredom can be a constant companion as well as a taunting challenge, and Ray chose long ago never to let himself be bored. As a small child, he took apart all of his Hannukah gifts, down to the tiny wires and screws, and re-assembled them to run more efficiently.

This lasted all of two days.

Slightly older, and nervous at the possibility of school dances, Ray taught himself every piece of choreography from every Gene Kelly film. He watched them obsessively on the little television in his room, pausing and rewinding and fast forwarding the VHS until it got all wibbly and fuzzy around the edges, and memorized every step. Late at night, when his mother took long bubble baths with a glass of wine, he’d take to the street outside their modest home and do the whole scene from Singing in the Rain, vaulting himself around lampposts, imagining a torrent of moisture and conjuring a grin of fearless artistry.

That took about a month. Surprisingly, the girls at school were not impressed; Ray danced alone. But from those moments with Gene, the hours dancing until his feet were blistered and sore, he learned something invaluable: boredom could be beaten.

Boredom could kiss his tap-dancing ass.

So he kept doing stuff - kept discovering or inventing little talents. He picked up the ukulele and was proficient within a week. He learned how to unicycle (that one he didn’t particularly enjoy - the risk of injury to delicate areas was intimidating in the extreme) and how to spin fire, sparks of lighter fluid trailing behind him as he made halos in the night air. He was a master of card tricks, and his mother was patient, if a little bemused, as he staged magic shows in their living room.

He was terribly cute in his little cape and top hat. 

And he fiddled and prodded and his electrical engineering skills grew, and he programmed the coffee pot to sing “Heather on the Hill” to his mother every morning. The toaster now pre-buttered the toast, thick slices of challah releasing their yeasty smell into the quiet of their kitchen, the coffee pot serenading them in Gene’s smooth voice. The refrigerator now told them, in a somewhat autocratic tone, when they needed to stock up on eggs. 

He was a genius. It was easy. And boredom was a waste of his time. 

As he got older, he reconsidered his romantic tactics, and embarked on a series of enrichment courses designed to make him seductive and debonair. Having heard his mother say, after a particularly good meal, that the way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach, he signed up for cookery classes. He learned how to make the perfect souffle, an impeccable duck a l’orange, cassoulet, rum soaked bread and butter puddings. Friday evenings, he’d sit his mother down and serve something new, something brilliant and inventive and rich with butter, and his mother would think, oh, Ray - 

You’re so smart. I don’t understand you.

He was so busy learning, so busy pushing himself, that he almost didn’t see the worry and rejection in her eyes. 

Women came and women went, and he loved them all, a little, and impressed them with his various talents, and with Anna he grasped at something he’d only seen in his old Hollywood films, and he could sit with her, quiet, and not do a damned thing. No learning. No working. No striving against boredom. 

It’s little wonder that after she was killed he was possessed with that old mania, with increased focus, with an incredible need to do something. And he built the Atom suit. He tried to be a hero. And that couldn’t possibly be boring - could it?

And time travel would never be dull, no, never, and when he got stuck in the 1950s he worked on his time beacon and he taught math and physics and he made love, tenderly, to Kendra, and he thought - maybe with her, maybe I’ll be able to rest again. 

Back on the Waverider, he felt her pulling away, and it was hard. But he knew how to handle women and the ways they left. Keep working. Keep doing. Be a hero - nothing boring about that.

Losing the Atom suit, then, was an indignity he was unprepared to face.

He turned to his old talents, the secret ones, the stupid ones, and Jax caught him dancing the dream sequence from An American in Paris in the cargo bay. Stein wandered into the galley to find Ray with a bottle of cocktail cherries and a pile of neatly coiled stems. He even got Nate to sing - he’d asked Gideon to fabricate a uke, and they sat around singing all the themes to their favorite childhood cartoons. 

Amaya humored him and sat through an hour of magic tricks. He didn’t have the cape, the top hat, but he was still terribly cute. Mick paused in the doorway, ubiquitous beer in hand, and stared at him with a banked heat - and when Ray convinced the whole team to take a night off to spin fire, Mick seemed almost entertained. Like there was a friendship there. Like there was something - a possibility.

Ray thought about Anna, about the mornings they would spend in bed, talking, doing nothing, and wondered if he would ever know that with another person. Mick took a swallow of grain alcohol and breathed it out over the flame of his heat gun, and fire spewed from his mouth. 

Now that - that was cool. He hadn’t ever learned how to do that.

Mick passed him the bottle, daring him, and Ray gulped down way too much alcohol and fire dribbled down his chest and Mick beat the fire out, not gentle in the least, and it was nice, and Ray had stopped thinking for five consecutive minutes.

He had the strongest urge to grab Mick’s face, roaring with laughter, and kiss him. 

That night, in his bunk, he was woozy with the strong burn of high proof hooch, and he let himself be still. He had mild burns, bruises where Mick had hit him, and he had a strange memory of his mother’s worried face. He laughed at himself, tired and drunk, and thought, no wonder, no wonder she was worried, when the only time I’ve felt happy in the past few weeks was getting an incidental beatdown from a felonious pyromaniac. 

Ray Palmer, he thought - you are fucking weird. 

And then it was back to normal - this new normal, without the suit - and he was making sack lunches for everyone. He knew how to cook, that was for sure, and despite Mick’s grumbling he knew even his sandwiches were divine. But bagged lunch was boring; he could feel the panic of nothingness in the back of his brain. So he started cooking more, cooking harder, and he made black raspberry cakes with chocolate ganache, and tender, buttery madeleines with blood orange marmalade, and squid-ink pasta with black truffles and burrata, and Mick found him in the galley with a butane torch and a tray of flawless cremes brulee. 

“Lighting more shit on fire?”

The sugar caramelized, the creme crackling, and Ray smiled up at Mick and held out the torch.

“Wanna try it?”

“What is that thing?”

“Kitchen torch. Kinda like your heat gun. But, um, for cooking.”

Mick came over to the counter and looked down at the one un-caramelized custard.

“You sure you wanna let me loose on your food?”

He looked dubious - almost, Ray realized with a slow delight, nervous - and Ray handed over the torch.

“Go for it.”

Ray explained how to use the torch, and so unlike his usual fury - totally at odds with his rough, wild, Heat Wave technique - Mick carefully burned the sugar with slow circles of flame. He was intent, quiet, and Ray watched him and thought, unexpectedly, about nothing at all. He breathed in this moment, cooking, sharing, Mick’s pine and smoke smell, caramel and custard, and he wasn’t doing anything but he wasn’t bored. 

He wasn’t bored.

He was definitely weird. Possibly, terminally weird.

But this - this was great. This was phenomenal.

“What’re you looking at? I did what you said.”

Ray cleared his throat and put his hands, which had been dangerously close to Mick’s shoulders, on the back of his neck. 

“You - you, uh, did a great job. It looks good.”

Mick made a small sound in the back of his throat, contented.

“Do we get to eat ‘em, or what?”

Ray laughed, a little high pitched, a little wild, and Mick gave him a strange look, and oh, my God, it was totally bizarre, the way he wanted to kiss him. 

“You okay, haircut?”

“Yes. Yes, totally okay. Eat me -” he was the most awkward person ever, “Them. Eat them. If you want.”

“Hmm.”

Mick picked up one of the little spoons that Ray had fabricated specifically for the creme brulee and cracked the warm sugar, digging into the sweet cream. 

“Tastes like fire,” he licked the spoon, a little caramelized sugar at the corner of his mouth, “I like it.”  
“Uhnf,” Ray could have sworn that one of his many talents was speaking English, but he seemed to have forgotten quite how to make that happen.

“You sure you’re okay, haircut?”

“Totally fine. Great. All is well. Yes.”

“Okay,” he picked up his dessert, and another, and turned to leave the mess, “You can make this again. No sprouts.”

“Right. Ha, because why would you put vegetables in creme brulee, I mean -”

“Night, haircut.”

“Goodnight.”

Mick walked off, down the hallway, and Ray watched his back - his broad shoulders, his thick neck - and realized that he hadn’t felt the urge to do anything other than be with this man in this moment, talking, spending time. Spending time with Mick, of all people, who was angry and bitter and a little crazy and kind of preternaturally good looking, now that he thought about it, and most of all, interesting. Captivating. 

Ray took a spoon and cracked the sugar on a creme brulee, and he thought about that possibility he had felt when they were breathing fire of friendship, connection - of a strong body touching his, rough, passionate, careless. He felt his face warm and he smiled.

No, he thought. There’s nothing boring about that.

**Author's Note:**

> Atomwave 2016 food challenge. I would absolutely fall head over heels if Ray made me French cuisine...


End file.
